iOS 6.1 goes public with Fandango support, ad tracking reset, and more

The update also benefits iTunes Match users who download songs from iCloud.

iOS 6.1 is now available to the public, either via iTunes or over-the-air directly to your iDevice. The update comes with some useful functionality fixes—especially for those who subscribe to iTunes Match or don't yet have access to LTE support—and there are even a couple new features, at least for those of us in the US.

The update was apparently significant enough for Apple to send out a press release. The company largely focused on the 36 additional carriers who will now support LTE on the iPhone 5 and the 23 new carriers for LTE on the iPad. The list of supported carriers can now be found online on Apple's iPhone 5 page.

Apple also added the ability to download individual songs from iCloud—a common complaint from iTunes Match users, who have found themselves stuck between syncing all songs over the cloud versus none at all. That's in addition to a new reset button for Apple's "Advertising Identifier" (Apple's solution for targeted ad tracking after deprecating the UDID.) Various privacy advocates complained that Apple's previous advertising ID switch was confusing and hard to find; from what we can tell, the switch is still in the same hard-to-find place, but there's a new button that lets you reset the identifier altogether.

iOS 6.1 now comes with a button that lets you reset the advertisement tracking altogether on your device.

Finally, there's one major new feature added for US users: the ability to purchase movie tickets using Siri. The feature uses third-party service Fandango to make the ticket sales, similar to how Siri handles restaurant recommendations through Yelp or reservations through OpenTable. This feature may not be as significant as those we added to our iOS wish list last week, but it should be useful for those movie buffs who like to get their tickets before showing up at the theater.

We're confident that iOS 6.1 contains a number of other smaller fixes that Apple didn't detail in its public release notes. Let us know if you find any other interesting tidbits while we dig through the update.